


Snow Rabbit

by kingozma



Category: Original Work, Snow Rabbit - Fandom
Genre: Bullying, Child Death, Children, Dystopia, Gen, Psychological Horror, Suicidal Thoughts, Unchildlike Adventures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23954947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingozma/pseuds/kingozma
Summary: a 10 page short story i wrote for a creative class i took a few years back... it was something i'd always wanted to write! i should revise + add to it sometime u_u mind the warnings in the tags![and slowly, the dream disappears...]
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	Snow Rabbit

Once upon a time not in the distant past or future, in a land far closer to ours than we’d want to admit, there was a little girl named Alyssa. She did not have a middle or last name. Neither did any of the other children on her side of the snowy dirt path, those children so few that she knew all their names by heart. Pepper. Penelo. Victor. And little Gracie who wasted away in her mother’s home years ago on the coldest day of the month, and whose mother she was ordered not to give any trouble for a while. But just like many little girls we know, she had a father, but no mother. But that was okay, she only needed one parent. One true friend.

He was a kind father who shone with a faint yellow too soft to be touched. Bright orange, sheer paper wrapped around his silver bones, vivid blue and green and yellow paint adorned him in simplistic flowers that Alyssa figured did not exist in reality. He floated in the air like a balloon and his fins trailed behind him as he tapped a delicate dance in the air. On particularly black, frozen nights, her father would glow for her. He glowed nearly every night until she turned 10 years old, when she let him know that she was no longer afraid of the dark. Of course, sometimes she was, but the concept of growing up was hemmed with forgivable fibs.

The truth of Alyssa’s life was that her father was the only thing she found beautiful in this world. Nothing else made her feel safe and secure, nothing made her crack even the smallest smile. Well. She supposed that was being over-dramatic. Books were pleasant, too. But outside of her father, her only true friend, it seemed that everything wonderful in life only existed within the pages of fiction. They didn’t exist.

In this flat glistening wasteland, a country of black toothpick trees and numb brown eyesores, Alyssa knew down to the depths of her being that what surrounded her world was absolutely nothing. Nothing but more woods, thousands of miles in every direction. Woods enough for someone to disappear in and never to be found again. Nowhere to go, nothing new to see, no one new to meet.

Alyssa planned to hang herself by the neck on one of those toothpick trees before she turned 13 years old.

It was as wintry a day as ever, the day that Alyssa encountered Pepper, Penelo and Victor. There was nothing particularly special about either of those details. It was always cold. It was always snowing. Pepper and his gang, who Alyssa believed were similar forces of nature, were always there.

“Good morning, _Lissie_ ,” said Pepper, the boy who stood taller than Penelo and shorter than Victor. The three boys did not surround her, but they crowded around her and towered above her. Even Penelo, who was two years younger than she, was taller.

Pepper was a pale, freckled boy with bright red hair and piercing blue eyes. Currently, his hands were on his hips, as if he learned to stand that way when speaking to his inferiors. He wasn’t wearing gloves, a coat, or even a long-sleeved shirt. How he got away with that with his mother watching confused Alyssa into even further numbness.

She adjusted the sagging hat on her head, her own hands clumsy under her thick brown mittens, and muttered under her breath, “That’s not my name.”

As always, her resistance made the boys laugh. Well, to be specific, Pepper laughed, Penelo mimed his laugh, and Victor gave the briefest snort.

“Pepper can calls you whatever he wants to call you, _Lissie_!” Chimed in Penelo, stepping forward beside his older brother. Not in front. Never in front. Penelo was about a head shorter than his older brother, with that same pale, freckled skin, that same red hair, and those same blue eyes. He just had the common sense to bring his fleece green jacket and earmuffs out in this weather. Little did Alyssa know, Penelo was ashamed of this common sense, and coveted the stupidity of his brother.

Hearing that sugary nickname twice in a row sent a shiver down Alyssa’s spine. How she hated being condescended to like this. And as always, she had no idea why these boys were so pleased to mildly annoy her. Giving a sigh so hot and heavy that she could see her own opaque white breath, Alyssa finally asked that burning question. “What do you want?”

Pepper sniffed hard, rubbing one finger under his nose, grinning through the cold biting his cheeks fingers. “So glad you asked!” he announced, straightening his back, “We’ve decided you’re joining us today. On an epic journey to the edge of the world itself! We’re gonna go deep in the woods today and we’re gonna see what’s out there. My _baby brother_ here thinks we’re gonna get lost.”

He paused his speech of utmost importance to roll his eyes precisely in his flinching little brother’s direction. Alyssa felt something approaching pity for Penelo. “But who cares? Isn’t that exciting?! Hell – they never let us wander into the woods! It’s like there’s something waiting out there for us, just beyond the trees! And I’m not gonna let them keep me from whatever treasures await. So. Anyway, you’re coming with us.”

Ah, yes. Alyssa loved decisions made without her knowledge or consent. Seemed Pepper’s gang were fond of them as well, considering how many similar decisions they’d made in the past. So many decisions, so many that she’d gone along with in the past, that the boiling disgust in her gut registered as anxiety. Fear of what would happen to her if she strayed from the plans they’d made for her – even if the greatest punishment she could receive would the exact thing she tried to convince herself she wanted: to be left alone.

“ I’d recommend for your sake that you don’t go tell your dad ,” said Victor, his own bare hands stuffed sensibly in his pockets. There was something kinder about this boy – or perhaps, this young man – than the other two, in spite of the menacing figure he cut. He grimaced at the words that just came out of his mouth, finding them altogether too threatening. But Alyssa didn’t much appreciate his gentleness given the fact that he never scolded his meaner friends. “That is – they’re just going to worry about you. I mean, we didn’t tell our parents, it would have been a hassle.”

Victor, the tallest boy of the bunch, was also the oldest. He was 16 years old, two years older than Pepper. He was only slightly less pale than his ginger friends, and his hair was a darker brown than Alyssa’s. He never smiled. His face was hard with a strange sort of maturity, wisdom that Pepper and Penelo could never hope to gain – with chocolatey brown eyes, much more pleasant to get lost in than Alyssa’s mousey almost-black eyes. His voice had even dropped. How marvelous for him. The boys seemed very impressed with him for that. His black coat was held together by a taut gold chain with two red gems for cuffs, and it was thin, so it didn’t do him much good as it flapped about like a skirt in the icy wind. But at least it made him look cool. Sometimes Alyssa wondered, was that all that mattered to these boys?

Alyssa bit her lip. These boys were already acting like she was just going to come along with them, because they told her to. Defiant yells echoed through her mind so loudly she had to shut her eyes and reorient herself. Enough of that, she wordlessly told herself, no need to make a fuss. This is business as usual.

“… When are we leaving?” She finally asked, a defeated scowl settling on her face. Pepper let out a breathless cackle, punching Victor in the arm.

“I KNEW she’d come along!” He wheezed so hard he started coughing. Apparently someone was enjoying himself. Alyssa couldn’t help but roll her eyes. Partly at Pepper’s theatrics, partly at the way she noticed Victor winced an entire second after Pepper’s fist bounced off his arm, like he rehearsed it, and partly because of something she knew deep down in her heart.

Pepper was annoying, but he was a dreamer, she would give him that much. But dreaming isn’t smart past the age of five or so. It almost hurt Alyssa’s feelings imagining how disappointed Pepper would be when they got to the edge of the forest and saw that the world itself ended. That there was nothing beyond these woods waiting for the boys or for Alyssa. That this town was all they had in life.

That life was essentially over. Oh, well. The boys all had to grow up someday.

“Be ready in a few hours. Penelo wants to pack a couple snacks so we don’t get too hungry,” said Victor, eyeing the younger brother with a stiff, practiced, compulsory frigidity. But Penelo just smiled back at him.

* * *

“Where the hell did she go?!”

The sounds of Pepper and his gang bickering grew softer and softer as Alyssa’s feet pounded into the snow, carrying her farther and farther away from their argument. She was so, so stupid to agree to come along with them. Now that she, once again, showed the boys that they could walk all over her if they were so inclined, they’d know they was their eternal doormat.

The little adventuring party had made it about ten minutes out of town, encountering the same dead black trees they’d seen all their lives, and that snow that never seemed to melt no matter how bright it was outside. And, with all due respect to his majesty, King Pepper, there were only so many minutes of that familiar, bleak nothingness that Alyssa could take before wanting to shave a few more years off her life expectancy. The gang said they only wanted to be out here for a short while, and she gave them their short while. She had no reason to stick around them any longer. She didn’t owe them anything.

’ _I shouldn’t feel guilty,_ ’ Alyssa said to herself again and again, wordlessly, through the searing pain in her lungs.

At first it was staying out of the boys’ peripheral vision. Just a clever turn behind a tree when Pepper wasn’t looking. And when they’d become accustomed to her keeping her distance from them, that’s when she bolted off, from tree to tree, too quickly to be seen.

Alyssa knew she had to stop running eventually. She couldn’t hear Pepper’s shouts anymore, they were far behind her. Her chest hurt so badly she couldn’t breathe anymore. And she had to come to terms with the worst part of all of this.

She hadn’t paid attention to the road. She was lost.

The exact moment her knees hit the icy ground was the moment she heard it.

“Hey!”

Alyssa lifted her head, half-expecting one of the boys to be standing before her. But to her surprise, no one was there.

“Hey! Seems you’re lost, little rabbit,” said a voice so friendly it almost sounded goofy. Alyssa’s eyes grew wide as she realized her legs were too heavy to start running again. It spoke again, and it said “From here, you’ve just gotta turn back the way you came to get back to town!”

“I don’t know how,” Alyssa said, her voice very small. And the voice – it was coming from up in the trees, she just couldn’t see its owner – gave a robust chuckle. Her mind filled with images of her father, and she began to feel a bit safer. Yes, she had to get back home to him very soon.

“These woods are awful deep and mysterious… Maybe you don’t remember the way you came. Well, from this exact position, you’ve gotta head behind you a good 5000 paces. But you’ll probably be able to see the edge of town much sooner than that, you won’t need much more advice than that.”

Alyssa stared at the general direction of the voice, lips parted. Tongue dry.

“… Thank y–”

“So THERE you are, Lissie!” announced Pepper. Alyssa turned to face him so quickly her neck felt sore. There he was, leaning against one of the many dead trees behind her, and so there Penelo and Victor were, covering his left and right flanks as always.

Alyssa didn’t have the strength to move as he approached her, but ended up leaning on the tree she’d been talking with these past couple minutes. “Talking to your imaginary friends again?” He asked, not noticing the palm-sized silver cube tumbling out of its branches, into the snow. Turning a smug eye up at Victor, he added, “Told you she should be getting her nose out of those dumb books,”

Only keeping the cube in the corner of her eye, she answered him in a low, quaking voice. “Thought I heard someone nearby.” The cube itself had a hexagon’s worth of black holes on one of its faces, and she only noticed the tiny red light under the holes because it had blinked a couple times and promptly died.

“Man,” said Pepper, when they continued back on their way… Or what was probably their way, since Pepper didn’t even try to make it back to where they were when Alyssa ran off, “When did we leave today?”

“Late afternoon. Something like that. Why do you ask?” Victor was stretching his neck to one side, and then the other.

“Isn’t it kinda… Supposed to get dark sometime soon?”

Victor furrowed his brows, pursing his lips, like Pepper had asked a ridiculous question. “What do you mean?”

“I mean – there’s a point at which the sky turns dark, you can tell cause you can’t see out your windows! Kinda just happens all at once with this loud bang! Bang! Bang! I mean, you’re all there, you hear it. I just thought it usually… Happened around this time.”

Victor glanced down at the underside of his wrist, adjusting the cuffs on his sleeves and trying to look unconcerned. “You don’t know how long we’ve been out here, Pepper. It’s best not to worry about it.”

Alyssa’s eyes bulged. She didn’t want to tell them that she saw the black boards that were nailed to the windows every day around this exact time.

The sky was as bright and blue as ever.

* * *

And the sky was right in their hands. Victor ran his long, pale fingers down the sky that was right in front of their faces. The sky was heavy, smooth, and reflected a white light.

His lips shook as he muttered a curse under his breath.

Penelo cowered behind Pepper, whose crossed arms and puzzled face told Alyssa that he and Victor were most certainly not on the same page. And Alyssa simply stood, numbly staring at Victor’s hand. That was probably the most real thing she could focus on right now.

“Wh-what is it?” asked Penelo, “Why’s– why’s there a big curtain out here?”

Alyssa looked behind her. The line where the dead, black toothpick trees ended was neat. Perfectly neat. Not a splinter ahead or behind the rest.

“It’s not a CURTAIN, Penelo,” Pepper said as he rolled his eyes. “If it was a curtain, where would they hang it from?”

Where from, indeed? In this monochrome world where everything was the same, where there were no fresh beginnings, no next-stages to reach – and thus, surely, no heaven or God… Where?

Victor’s hand drew back from the curtain, and it clasped over his mouth. His other hand followed suit, as he stared deep into the soil. “I don’t think it’s hanging from anywhere,” he said, voice trembling under the weight of a reality only he and Alyssa understood.

Pepper’s lips quirked to one side, and he gave a scoff. “Okay, now you’re just wigging out, and I don’t know what for. Maybe it’s a wall! People build walls all the time! Hey – in this one story I read, this made-up world called ‘Germany’ was divided by a wall for a long time. Maybe our town is the same, somebody doesn’t want us getting in and out for some reason! Well, you know what? I say, to hell with'em! We can go wherever we want, right, guys?!”

Alyssa gagged, feeling her heart shot up into her own throat as she saw Victor’s hand reach out to the curtain again. “Wait,” she coughed, and all the boys looked to her.

If this was a curtain like Penelo said it was, or a wall like Pepper theorized, then a number of concepts had to be considered and processed. One, a curtain can be opened, a wall can be knocked down. Two, when opened or knocked down, a curtain or wall can be passed through.

Three.

There is always something waiting on the other side of a curtain or wall.

Alyssa backed away from the boys’ eyes, her back leaning up against the perfect wall of trees. If there was something waiting on the other side of this curtain, or wall, or whatever it was… Then she was wrong. She was wrong about everything. Then her isolated, dreary, sad little town was not all she had to live for. Her father, regardless of how much she adored him and he adored her, was not her only reason for grinning through the terrible burden of being alive. Could it be said that fresh beginnings did exist? Could it be said that this was the next stage of existence? There could very well be something out there. No – there _was_ something out there. And there was a chance all the books she read as a little girl were inspired by something out there.

A terrible thrill filled Alyssa, an awful, irrational joy. For the first time since she was a very little girl, her face was wriggling against itself. Her lips were tight, pushed right up against each other, and there was something wonderful building up inside her stomach.

But she didn’t want to let the boys see her smile. How embarrassed would she be if there was nothing to be excited about?

Before she buckled under her own immense anticipation, she told Victor, “Okay, do it.”

* * *

Victor parted the sky with one arm, but it was a heavy burden for just one man. To his surprise, Pepper was there right beside him, lifting the curtain as far as it needed to open for Penelo and Alyssa to step outside. Before Alyssa got one foot out of her snowy wasteland, Penelo gasped.

The new sky facing them was orange. And pink. And purple, with splotches of fluffy grey. A wonderful canvas on which the warm shades of what we know is a sunset were lovingly painted. In the center of this mind-blowing interplay of fire, smoke and petals was a great yellow orb. None of the children could stare straight out it without their eyes beginning to water and sting, but they couldn’t help it. They stared straight at the light as long as they could until they felt their vision begin to blur – and decided that there were other things they wanted to see before they went blind.

So their vision turned to the ground. Not a speck of snow to be found here, the ground was dry, warm, and filled with soft strokes of green. Just ahead of them was a road that turned _downward_ (was that even possible?), leading into a maze of yellow flowers with brown faces, all facing the yellow orb as it sunk in the sky, as if in worship of its glory. Even farther out there, in this grand new world, the children could see tall black buildings standing on tall, thin black legs, appearing to exist for nothing other than the pleasure of climbing up inside them and enjoying the view.

Alyssa was the first to run.

Before Pepper could snatch the back of her coat, Alyssa ran downhill, straight for the sunflowers. “You can’t catch me!” She cried out, “You’ll never catch me, I don’t have to do anything you tell me anymore! I am free, and there is nothing you can do to stop–”

A great and mighty bang echoed through the valley, louder than anything the boys had ever heard. Alyssa was face-first on the ground, twitching pitifully in the dirt.

The boys noticed right away, the splash of red that now tainted the stalks of sun-worshipping flowers that so cruelly turned away from Alyssa’s body. But Penelo was the only one who didn’t seem to see the way Alyssa’s head wasn’t brown-black anymore, but rather a sort of – soft, pillowy pink that scattered in with her hair and along the grass. What he swears to this day that he saw was a flower crown on her head.

And so the red spread.

“Get back inside,” said Victor.

Pepper and Penelo didn’t move a muscle.

“Get back _INSIDE_ , we are LEAVING,” said Victor, pushing the curtain up to his own head, filled with a sort of strength he’d never had anymore.

Penelo wordlessly hurried back inside, eyes glued to the ground. Pepper didn’t move a muscle.

“Pepper, we are LEAVING, _RIGHT NOW_!” Victor yelled from his gut, reaching out and yanking Pepper back inside the snowy world by his collar.

And so, the curtain closed. As far as Victor was concerned, it never opened.


End file.
